Well, Python kind of does the reverse of a semicolon: If you want to continue a statement over multiple lines, then you have to \ escape it.

That's not true. Being within parentheses, brackets, quotes, etc. is enough for the parser to know you're continuing. In practice, I find that context is already present in most cases.

For the other cases, occasionally surrounding an expression in parentheses is easy enough. Long conditionals probably deserve parentheses anyway, for clarity.

I am a Scala and Rust fan. I can corroborate what you said

The part about no semicolons/curly braces I like in Scala is that I can write a function and it'll look virtually indistinguishable from a regular ol variable. Functions become much less of a ritual and integrate more nicely with the rest of the code. Other than that though, Rust definitely wins out because of the curly braces & semicolons. I use curly braces in most situations in Scala where I'd normally use them in Rust, and I would use semicolons everywhere in Scala if it weren't considered unidiomatic. Whitespace-significant syntax is just really annoying to deal with. Using Python or even maybe F# makes me want to die because I keep accidentally missing an indent somewhere or indenting too much somewhere else or using the wrong kind of whitespace and the entire program implodes. At least Scala and Kotlin keep it sane

Also it's just way harder to visually organize in whitespace based languages. You basically have to do a bunch of magic tricks to make the code look slightly different in a specific scenario than what the language wants you to. Rust allows you to actually visually organize your code easily while also having a strong style rules which you shouldn't stray too far from (or else the compiler will yell at you).